Bahar Mirhosseni

Bahar Mirhosseni is a criminal defense lawyer and human rights attorney. As a Lecturer at UCLA School of Law she teaches Law 835, Pay or Stay: An Exploration of the Bail System in America. She is formerly MENA Program Director at The International Legal Foundation where she worked with The ILF's lawyers in the MENA region on access to justice, human rights, and high quality public defense. Previously, she was the Associate Director of Training at Movement Law Lab where her work centered on training legal organizations, law students, legal workers, and lawyers in shifting the culture and practice of lawyering. She has spent over a decade in indigent defense, in New York and California, first through The Legal Aid Society of New York, as a public defender in Brooklyn and as a Criminal-Immigration Staff Attorney representing non-citizens, conducting select post-conviction advocacy, and advising criminal defense attorneys across New York City. As a Legal Specialist for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, she oversaw a legal education program for Palestinian law students across the West Bank. As a Fellow with the International Legal Foundation, Bahar has mentored/trained public defenders in Palestine, Tunisia, and Afghanistan. Mirhosseni received her B.A. degree with Honors from the University of California at Berkeley and her J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law. As a law student, she was awarded the Haywood Burns Fellowship in Civil and Human Rights from CUNY Law School and a Millspaugh-Catlin Fellowship in Human Rights as an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Hedgebrook Writing Residency awarded her the Women Authoring Change Fellowship in honor of slain Libyan human rights advocate Salwa Bugaighis. Bahar is a recipient of a 2021 writing fellowship with Kweli Journal.